DuckDuckGo has become the go-to choice when it comes to using a search engine that respects privacy. In fact, its growth has been constant over the last decade, reaching tens of millions of search requests per day. This growth has received a strong boost in 2021, having been almost 47% .
If in October 2018 we reported that DuckDuckGo had some 30 million daily searches , that amount has now risen to approximately 100 million , which is not not bad for a competitor that is quite small than Google, a giant that has clearly dominated the search engine market in the last two decades at least in the West, and that, despite the doubts generated by Google’s policies, does not It can be denied that their search engine is still the best, especially when you want to find very specific things from specialized fields.
The growing popularity of DuckDuckGo is primarily aimed at increasing awareness of privacy. The search engine has shown throughout its existence that it does not track users, although it does show advertising related to the keywords used in searches. Obviously, from somewhere it must obtain financial resources to continue operating, and advertising is one of the most used means, but luckily DuckDuckGo does not make any user profiles.
At the technology level, to build its search index uses its own spider called DuckDuckBot to crawl websites and receive data from partners such as Wikipedia and Bing, but it does not use data from Google. Of course, to guarantee the protection it offers at the level of privacy, it would be better to avoid using highly questioned browsers such as Google Chrome.
The growth of DuckDuckGo has allowed it to embark on other projects, such as a protection system against Android application tracking , a protection service for email and more recently a desktop web browser , although in the latter case you have opted for an approach that will not appeal to everyone.
Finally, and despite the omnipresence of Google, there is a outstanding number of neutral search engines , among which are Qwant, MetaGer and Startpage apart from DuckDuckGo. More recently, Brave has joined the competition, developed and maintained by the same company responsible for the derivative of Chromium published as free software . Brave Search is more independent by using unique and proprietary results, while DuckDuckGo relies on Google’s Bing and Qwant results.